The first of a series of five annual Awards, presented by Nicolai Tangen, was announced on December 13 2017. The Award, offered this year to graduates of The Courtauld’s MA Programme Curating the Arts Museum (2016/17), has been conceived to support and encourage the development of curatorial skills among recent graduates, and follows a competition for exhibition proposals based on Nicolai Tangen’s extensive collection of modernist art in all media from the Nordic countries. Students focused on a wide range of themes and periods in their proposals.
The Award, a prize of £2500, has been won by Harry Dougall, for a proposal titled Between the Trees.
Two runners-up (each receiving £500) were selected: Suzanna Petot for her proposal, Eyes on the World: Norwegian Art in the 1970s; and a collaborative proposal submitted by Elizabeth Shoshany Anderson, Janette Rita Aquilina, Zoe Mercer-Golden, Myrthe Huijts and Nathan Stazicker: The Revolution is Here – Come With!
The Award was judged by Martin Caiger-Smith, Head of the Curating MA, and Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Director of The Courtauld Gallery, with Nicolai Tangen. Harry Dougall’s winning exhibition proposal particularly impressed the judges for its original and provocative approach to a landscape theme, its intelligent and wide-ranging selection of works in all media from across the collection, and the formal sophistication of its proposed layout. The jurors found the overall standard of the submissions very strong. Nicolai Tangen commented: ‘I was enormously impressed by the very high quality proposals. Clearly an incredibly talented group of curators!’
The Tangen Collection has been offered to the town of Kristiansand, in southern Norway, where it will be located, together with the collection of the Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, in a new museum to be constructed on the town’s waterfront, a complete refurbishment of a former grain silo. Following an open international competition in 2016, the project selected was Silosamlingen, developed as a collaboration between Mestres Wage Arquitectes and MX_SI Architectural Studio in Barcelona. The Museum is due to open in 2021.